River of Blue Fire

by Tad Williams

  “But I use net equipment all the time, Chloe! It’s my job, you know that!”

  “Let me finish, sweetie.” She said it as she might to a cranky child. “Out of all the cases of all the kids that the research engines could find, not a single one of them had ever been a participant on the Uncle Jingle show, or any of the spin-offs. I cross-collated the WorldReach medical files with the network’s, so I know. Think about that. There have been millions of kids over the years who’ve participated, and not a single one has ever become sick in this particular way.”

  “So you’re saying . . .”

  “That when they figure out what it is, it’ll probably be some kind of glitch in transmission signals, maybe, or something like that—something that interferes with brainwaves, maybe. That’s what Tandagore thinks, according to the articles. But whatever it is, it sure isn’t in our transmission signals, is it? Ipso facto—an important term for someone in my department to know, don’t you think?—you don’t have Tandagore’s Syndrome.”

  Olga petted Misha and tried to make sense of it all. “So you’re saying that I don’t have something I never heard about until today?”

  Chloe laughed, but there was a little frustration beneath it. “I’m saying that this Tandagore thing is the only possibility other than plain old stress, or things your doctor already looked for. Your doctor says you’re fine. You can’t have Tandagore because no one connected even remotely with the show ever has, so it must be simply overwork and too much worrying.” Chloe smiled brightly. “So stop worrying!”

  Olga thanked her with more heartiness than she felt and clicked off. Misha had fallen asleep, so even when she unplugged, she remained in the chair. The sun had gone down behind the train tracks, and the living room had fallen into shadow. Olga listened to the sounds of the birds, one of the reasons she lived in Juniper Bay. Big enough to have link stations that could handle major throughput, small enough still to have birds. There were none left in Toronto except pigeons and seagulls, and someone on the newsnets had said all the surviving pigeons were a mutant strain anyway.

  So it was either simple stress, or it was a Whatsit Syndrome she couldn’t have. Chloe was young and smart and had the best commercial research engines at her disposal, and she said so. Which meant the rest of Olga’s own research could be avoided. Why didn’t she feel better?

  From the far side of the room, the Uncle Jingle figure looked back at her, black button eyes and xylophone teeth. His huge smile was really a kind of smirk, wasn’t it? If you really studied it.

  It’s strange, she thought. If there have been a million cases of this stuff and not a single one was someone who had hooked into the show. I mean, it’s hard to find a kid out there who hasn’t been plugged into Uncle Jingle at some time or other.

  The room felt cold. Olga suddenly wished the sun would come back.

  In fact, that seems more than a little strange. That seems . . . very unlikely.

  But what could it mean except coincidence, that lots of kids were having problems from being on the net, but no one who’d ever been involved with her own show? That there was something extra-good about their equipment? Extra-healthy?

  Or . . . She pulled Misha closer. The dog whimpered and flailed his paws, as though dogpaddling in some dream-river, then settled again. The room was getting quite dark now.

  Or the other way around? So bad that someone didn’t want anyone to make a connection between the two?

  That’s silly, Olga. Stupid. Someone would have to be doing it on purpose, then. You’ve gone from headaches to paranoia.

  But the monstrous idea would not go away.

  CHAPTER 11

  Utensils

  * * *

  NETFEED/NEWS: Plug or Play, Charge Addicts Told

  (visual: waiting room in Great Ormond Street Hospital)

  VO: England’s first-ever Liberal Democrat government has given that country’s charge addicts a choice: either have their neurocannulas—“cans” as the addicts, or “heads,” call them—permanently sealed with a polymer glue, or accept a software device known as a “gear filter,” which will block any unacceptable programming, and can also be set to dispense helpful subliminals. Under new law, all registered addicts must agree to one of these two options if they wish to keep their benefits. Citizens’ rights groups are furious . . .

  * * *

  AS the blue light died, water was suddenly everywhere around them. In some incomprehensible fashion they were in the middle of it but still dry, rushing forward through damp air as though the river had curled into a tube around them. The noise was so loud that when Orlando shouted, not only could Fredericks not hear him, he could not hear himself.

  They rocketed through a curve at high speed, then the front of the leaf-boat plunged downward. Orlando grabbed desperately for a handhold, but could feel himself lifting free of the boat, floating backward even as they fell.

  The light changed. An instant later they slammed down into something that shook them so hard that it was only a few dazed moments later, when he felt himself beginning to sink, that Orlando realized they had landed in more water. Within moments he had lost the leaf-boat completely. The river or waterfall or whatever it had become was pounding down almost on top of him, roiling the surface so badly that he could not understand which way was up. He finally caught a glimpse of Fredericks floating face-down a short distance away, but even as he tried to call to him, his friend was caught up by the surging waters and pulled beneath the surface.

  Orlando took a deep breath and dove after him, then turned until he saw Fredericks’ motionless form drifting down. The water was brilliantly clear, and all the lake bottom he could see was a bright and featureless white. Orlando kicked hard, thrusting himself toward his friend. He managed to get one hand wrapped in the cowl of Fredericks’ Pithlit robe, then struggled toward what he guessed was the surface, a darker spot in the middle of a leaning ring of whiteness.

  It seemed to take days. Fredericks’ limp weight was the single heaviest thing he had ever lifted. At last, with his breath turning to fire in his chest, he broke the surface and heaved Fredericks’ head above water. His friend took a racking breath, then coughed out what seemed like gallons. He appeared strange in some way Orlando could not immediately define, but it was impossible to look too carefully with waves slapping at both their faces. Orlando kicked to keep them above the surface, but the cataract was still thundering down only a few meters away and he was losing strength rapidly. A brief but depressing glimpse between waves showed him that the white walls or shore above the waterline appeared smooth as glass.

  “Can you swim?” he gasped. “I don’t think I can hold you up.”

  Fredericks nodded miserably. “Where’s the boat?”

  Orlando shook his head.

  Fredericks began a weary crawl-stroke toward the nearest wall. Orlando did his best to follow, and regretted once again that he had never had swimming lessons. Swimming in Otherland was nothing like when Thargor stroked his way across a deep tarn or castle moat in the Middle Country. For one thing, Thargor didn’t get tired this easily.

  He caught up to Fredericks, who was pawing hopelessly at the smooth white wall. “What is this?” his friend moaned. “There aren’t any handholds.”

  Orlando looked up. Above them, the sheer wall rose for several more meters, and above that . . . “Oh, fenfen,” Orlando said, then a wave slapped him in the face and he drank more water. It was fresh, not salt, which made sense. “Not again!” he said when he could breathe.

  “What?”

  Orlando pointed. The cataract was pouring down from a long silver pipe connected to the white wall, with two odd crenellated circles flanking it. Faucet. Taps. They were in a sink. Hanging in the air far overhead, glowing like the moon, and seemingly only slightly smaller, was a vast lightbulb.

  “No!” Fredericks moaned. “Th
is is so impacted.”

  The bad news was that their boat, or something dark that seemed to be their boat, was trapped at the bottom of the sink, battered beneath the stream of water sluicing down from the titan faucet. The good news, as they discovered a few moments later, was that it seemed to have blocked the drain and the water in the sink was rising.

  “If we just stay afloat, it’ll lift us over the top.” Fredericks swung sopping hair off his face and turned to Orlando. “Are you okay? Can you make it?”

  “I don’t know. I guess so. I’m really tired.” His friend still looked odd—simplified somehow—but Orlando could not summon the energy to try to figure out what was wrong.

  “I’ll help when you need it.” Fredericks felt the porcelain. “This is so barking. It’s like being stuck in the deep end of the pool forever.”

  Orlando had no more breath to waste.

  Slowly, the water inched up the walls of the sink. When he felt his rhythm working properly for a moment, his legs moving without too much pain, Orlando looked up. The angle of the sink walls made it hard to see anything much below the ceiling, but there was still something decidedly strange about the place, and it was nothing as straightforward as the disproportionate size. The shadows fell oddly, and both the lightbulb and sink seemed inexplicably unreal, although there was nothing ghostly or insubstantial about either of them. Even the water seemed to move too slowly, and with none of the absolute realism it had possessed in other parts of the network.

  He looked at Fredericks, and finally realized what had been bothering him. His friend’s features, while still three-dimensional, had become somehow flatter, as though rendered with much less sophisticated animation gear than they had encountered elsewhere in the Otherland network. But what did it mean?

  It was only when the Indian brave—a comic savage with an impossibly red face, a nose like a sausage, and rolling eyes—climbed up onto the edge of the sink and peered down at them that Orlando realized they were stranded in some kind of cartoon.

  “Ugh,” the Indian said. “You seen papoose?”

  Fredericks goggled at the stranger. “This can’t be happening.”

  “Can you help us out?” Orlando shouted. “We’re drowning!”

  The Indian stared at them for a moment, his fierce but simple expression absolutely unreadable, then reached into his buckskin vest and produced, from nowhere, a length of rope. His arms bending in ways that jointed appendages did not bend, he quickly threw a loop around one of the faucets, then tossed the other end down to them.

  It was not a swift process, but with the Indian pulling and Orlando and Fredericks keeping their feet flat against the slippery porcelain wall, they managed to climb the last few meters to safety. Orlando clung to the chilly faucet in gratitude.

  “So? Palefaces seen papoose?” The Indian had stowed the rope, and now stood with arms folded across his chest. Orlando couldn’t remember exactly what a papoose was, but he was not going to let a potentially friendly contact go to waste.

  “No. But we owe you our lives. We’ll help you look.” Fredericks shot him a look, but Orlando ignored him. “What can we do?”

  The Indian looked down into the sink. “Better come back to teepee. Soon water reach top, spill over, make big lake on floor.”

  Fredericks was looking Orlando up and down. “You look really weird, Orlando. Like a Captain Comet play figure or something.”

  Orlando looked down. His torso was indeed an exaggerated, upside-down triangle. He could only imagine what Thargor’s features must look like in this shorthand form. “Yeah, well, you look pretty scanny, too,” he pointed out. “Like some kind of Uncle Jingle reject. Your feet don’t even have toes.”

  The Indian seemed to find their conversation either unintelligible or irrelevant. He turned and began walking along the edge of the sink, then suddenly leaped down into apparent nothingness.

  “Jee-zus!” Fredericks stared. “He just jumped!”

  “Come on.” Orlando limped after their rescuer.

  “Are you . . . ? What, you’re going to jump off, just because he did? He’s some kind of construct, Orlando!”

  “I know. He’s an old-fashioned cartoon. Just look at this place. It’s all a cartoon, Fredericks, an animated drawing. Like from the last century.”

  “I don’t care. We could go that way instead.” Fredericks pointed. On the far side of the sink, a long smooth wooden counter led away, a clutter of shelves at the back hidden by shadow. “At least we can see where we’d be going.”

  “Yeah, but he went that way.”

  “So?”

  “So we don’t know our way around. So let’s get going, before we lose the only person since we’ve been in this impacted network who’s done anything nice for us.”

  Fredericks clambered to his feet, streaming water. “I will never, never let you talk me into anything again. Ever.”

  Orlando turned and limped toward the place where the Indian had disappeared. “Fair enough.”

  The cartoon brave had not, as it turned out, jumped to his doom. Below the edge of the sink, only a body-length down, stood a small table—small by the standards of the environment, although to Orlando and Fredericks it was at least an acre wide—cluttered with an array of boxes and bottles. Beyond the table, squatting in the corner like a particularly fat black dog, stood some kind of impossibly antique-looking stove. Red light showed through the slits in its grille.

  The Indian was standing in front of one of the boxes, a rectangular cardboard shape that loomed twice his own height. Painted on its cover was a stylized tent, and above it the words “Pawnee Brand Matches.”

  “Come to my teepee,” he said, gesturing toward the box. “We smoke peace pipe.”

  Fredericks shook his head in disgust, but followed Orlando. The Indian reached the box and stepped into it, right through the surface, as though the heavy cardboard were permeable as air. Orlando shrugged and did the same, half-expecting to bump his face against the flat picture of the tent, but instead suddenly found himself inside a three-dimensional and surprisingly spacious version of the painted teepee. Fredericks followed a moment later, eyes wide. A campfire burned at the center of the conical space, the smoke twining upward to the hole at the top where the tentpoles came together.

  The Indian turned and gestured for them to sit, then lowered himself to face them. A woman came forward from the shadows, equally bright red and exaggerated of feature, and stood beside him. She wore a deerskin blanket and a single feather in her hair.

  “Me named Chief Strike Anywhere,” the Indian said. “This my squaw, Dispose Carefully. Who you, palefaces?”

  As the squaw brought them blankets to wrap around their wet, cold virtual bodies, Orlando introduced himself and Fredericks. Strike Anywhere grunted his satisfaction, then called for his wife to bring the peace pipe. As he filled it with something from a pouch—also produced from nowhere—Orlando began to wonder how he would light it, since the Chief himself, judging by his pale wooden neck and round crimson head, seemed to be an old-fashioned match. A bemused vision of the chief rubbing his head against the floor and bursting into flame was proved wrong when the pipe began to smoke without introduction of any visible incendiary.

  The smoke was hot and foul, but Orlando did his best to hold it in. As Fredericks struggled to do the same, Orlando wondered again about the strange capacities of the Otherland network. How sophisticated would it have to be to reproduce the sensation of inhaling heated smoke? Would that be easier than simulating the gravity of being spurted out of a giant faucet, or more difficult?

  When they had all sucked on the pipe, Strike Anywhere handed it back to his wife, who performed a sleight of hand to make it vanish again. The chief nodded. “Now us friends. I help you. You help me.”

  Fredericks was distracted by the bowl full of berries that Dispose Caref
ully was setting in front of him, so Orlando took it on himself to continue the conversation. “What can we do to help you?”

  “Bad men take my papoose, Little Spark. I hunt for him. You come with me, help find papoose.”

  “Certainly.”

  “Help kill bad men.”

  “Uh . . . certainly.” He ignored Fredericks’ look. They were only cartoons, after all. It wouldn’t be like helping to kill real people.

  “That good.” Strike Anywhere folded his arms on his chest and nodded again. “You eat. Then you sleep little. Then, when midnight come, we go hunting.”

  “Midnight?” Fredericks asked around a mouthful of berries.

  “Midnight.” The cartoon Indian smiled a hard smile. “When all of Kitchen awake.”

  IT was the same nightmare; as always, he was powerless before it. The glass broke, showering outward into the sunlight like a spray of water, each piece spinning like a separate planet, the cloud of iridescence a universe that had lost its equilibrium and was now flying apart in high-speed entropic expansion.

  The cries echoed and echoed, as they always did.

  He woke, shuddering, and brought his hand to his face, expecting to feel tears, or at least the sweat of terror, but his own features were hard and cold beneath his fingers. He was in his throne room in the lamplit great hall of Abydos-That-Was. He had fallen asleep and the old nightmare had returned. Had he cried out? The eyes of a thousand kneeling priests were on him, startled stares in frozen faces, like mice caught in the pantry when the light is switched on.

  He rubbed his mask of a face again, half-believing that when he took his hands away he would see something else—but what? His American fortress on the shore of Lake Borgne? The inside of the tank that kept his failing body alive? Or the house of his childhood, the chateau in Limoux, where so much had begun?

  The thought of it brought him a sudden picture, the reproduction of David’s drawing that had hung on the back of his bedroom door, Napoleon the First crowning himself emperor while a disconsolate pope looked on. What an odd picture to have in a child’s room! But he had been an odd child, of course, and something in the grandeur of the Corsican’s unstoppable self-belief had caught his imagination.